Right now, the most valuable companies

on Earth are racing to sell you their

stock. It's more money, bigger names,

and higher valuations than anything the

stock market has ever seen. To some

people, this is the opportunity of a

lifetime. The greatest technology boom

in history is finally opening its doors.

For decades, the best companies stayed

private, growing in the dark, and were

out of reach for ordinary people. But

now at last, the doors are being thrown

open, and you get the chance to own a

piece of the businesses that could

define the next 100 years. But to

others, this isn't a celebration at all.

It's a trap. That's the side I'm on, and

by the end of this video, I'm fairly

confident you'll be on this side, too.

Because in the stock market, an open

door is never a favor. Generosity is

never just out of the kindness of

someone's heart. It's like nobody

stopped to consider that in finance,

every trade needs a counterparty. Every

buyer needs a seller. So, if you're

trying to buy stock, someone has to be

willing to sell it to you. Which means

before you buy what they're selling,

there's one simple question worth

asking. Why are they selling? In an

initial public offering, the people on

the other side of the trade aren't

random. They're the founders who built

these companies, the early employees who

gave them years of their lives, the

venture capitalists who funded them when

they were nothing. Nobody on Earth

understands these businesses better than

they do, and they've seen the numbers

you and I will never get to see. And

they've looked at the most exciting

companies of our lifetime, the ones

everyone are desperate to own, and they

made a decision. They'd rather have your

cash than their own shares. This is what

an IPO actually is. Strip away the

headlines and the celebration, and it's

a trade with massive information

asymmetry. The sellers are the most

informed people in the room, which means

the buyer, by definition, is the least.

And right now, that buyer is you. So,

here's the thought that should be

lighting up in the back of your mind,

the one that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and

everyone else behind this wave are

quietly counting on you not to ask. If

these really are the most valuable, most

important companies in the world, and

the future is as bright as everyone

keeps promising, then why are the people

who know them best in such a hurry to

sell them to you? And there's an answer.

It's a pattern that's repeated

throughout the history of the stock

market. It's shown up again and again

right before nearly every major

financial bubble pops, and most people

have no idea it's sitting right in front

of their eyes. I call it the dine and

dash. In poker, a tell is a small

unconscious signal that gives away what

someone actually believes, no matter

what they're saying out loud. Well,

markets have tells, too. They don't come

from headlines or earnings calls, and

they definitely don't come from CNBC.

They come from watching what people

actually do with their money. That's one

of the clearest tells there is, because

the average investor sells when they get

scared, when the news turns or the chart

drops, when everyone around them is

already running for the door. But, the

professionals do the exact opposite. As

Benjamin Graham, the father of value

investing and Warren Buffett's mentor,

said, "The intelligent investor is a

realist who sells to optimist and buys

from pessimist." They sell when

everything looks perfect, when the story

is loudest, the optimism is highest, and

there's a line of buyers out the door

begging to get in, because that's the

moment you can get the most money for

the thing you're selling, which is

exactly what the IPO data shows us. When

markets are booming, companies rush to

go public and sell shares. But, when

markets turn south, those IPOs disappear

faster than my situationship the second

I ask her, "So, what are we?" That's the

top being sold to you. And like I

mentioned earlier, we've seen this

pattern again and again throughout

history. Let's go back to June of 2007.

Wall Street was booming, the markets

were hot, and the two founders of

Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman and Peter

Peterson, decided it was time to cash in

on some of it. Side note, who looks at a

newborn and lands on the name Peter

Peterson? Anyways, they took Blackstone

public, and between them, the two

co-founders walked away with about 2.6

billion dollars in cash. Then, a little

over a year later, the global financial

crisis hit, the markets crashed, and

Blackstone's stock plummeted roughly

90%. It's almost like the soon-to-be

world's largest alternative asset

manager knew it was time to exit out of

some assets. Or we can go back a little

further to the dot-com bubble. In the

years leading up to the dot-com crash,

the number of companies going public

exploded. And in 1999, the year before

the bubble popped, the concentration hit

a record. Of every company that went

public that year, around 51% came from a

single sector, tech. Then the year after

all of them listed, after the insiders

got rich and retail thought they were

buying a piece of the digital future,

the bubble popped. Over the next 2 and

1/2 years, the Nasdaq crashed more than

75% and an estimated $5 trillion in

market value simply evaporated. It took

15 years for the Nasdaq to recover. And

most of the companies that sold stock on

the way up never made it to the other

side. A study by the Kauffman Foundation

and Professor Jay Ritter, the man known

as Mr. IPO, found that 10 years after

going public, only 29% of the emerging

growth companies that went public

between 1996 and 2000 were still

standing as independent public

companies. The rest were gone. The thing

people thought they were buying no

longer existed. But in 2021, we saw the

same tail show up wearing a different

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sponsoring this video. Now, back to that

costume. Because in 2021, this same tale

disguised itself as something Wall

Street swore was the future. The SPAC.

These are companies that go public

before they're actually a company. You

raise money from investors first, list

on the exchange, and then go shopping

for a real business to merge with. It's

an empty shell with a checkbook, which

is why people call them blank check

companies. The appeal was simple. A SPAC

let a private company reach the public

market without sitting through the

scrutiny of a normal IPO. It skipped a

lot of the normal vetting process. So,

the money came rushing in. In 2021

alone, 613 SPACs went public and raised

more than 160 billion dollars. For a

year, these blank check shells made up

more than half of every new company

hitting the US market. And the story

ends exactly how you'd expect. Companies

that completed a SPAC merger in 2021

lost 67% of their value on average. For

those that de-SPACed in 2022, the

average loss was 59%. And just like we

saw in on com the activity collapsed

right after the rug got pulled out from

underneath everyone. From 248 SPACs in

2020 to 613 in 2021 to just 86 in 2022.

That's the dine and dash. When markets

are booming, insiders are selling. When

markets aren't, they aren't selling.

It's a cycle we've seen over and over.

So, what about AI? There's still a

question that needs answering. Why now?

Why are the most valuable companies in

the world, fierce rivals who agree on

almost nothing, all racing to sell you

stock at the exact same moment? It comes

down to two numbers. The first being the

spending. I covered this in a previous

video, but since 88% of the people

watching this aren't subscribed, here's

the quick version. This year, the

largest technology companies on Earth

are on track to spend around $725

billion building out artificial

intelligence. That's up roughly 77% from

the year before. It's the largest and

fastest infrastructure build out in

history, but most people struggle to

even conceptualize how much $725 billion

actually is. So, I'll use the same

example I used in my previous video

because I think it captures the

absurdity of this better than anything

else. If you spent $1 million

every single day starting from the day

Jesus was born all the way through the

fall of the Roman Empire, the Middle

Ages, the Renaissance, both World Wars,

and every single day up to right now,

you still wouldn't have spent what Big

Tech alone will spend on AI in just

2026. It breaks down to roughly $2

billion a day, 83 million an hour, or

about $23,000 every second. But, there's

also a second number that perfectly sums

up the AI industry, and it's a number

you probably have never seen. It's what

all that spending is actually earning

back. The research firm Exponential View

put together the first real bottom-up

estimate of the entire AI economy. Over

the past 12 months, all of it combined

generated an estimated $110 billion in

revenue, and that's revenue, not profit.

Put another way, the entire AI economy

earned back an amount equal to roughly

15% of what Big Tech alone plans to

spend this year. By any standard, that's

a horrible investment. But I know what

some of you are probably thinking.

That's mostly Big Tech. Surely it's

better for everyone else, like the

actual businesses using this stuff. And

the answer is no. It's actually far

worse. Deloitte surveyed more than 3,000

business and IT leaders across 24

countries. They found that 74% of

organizations want AI to grow their

revenue, but only 20% have actually seen

it happen. Another study by researchers

at MIT looked even closer. They studied

hundreds of real corporate AI rollouts,

actual companies spending real money to

put this technology to work, and they

found that 95% of them produced zero

measurable return. So, put those numbers

side by side. $725 billion going in,

almost nothing coming back out. That gap

between what's being spent and what's

being earned is what nobody seems to be

watching. In fact, the market has priced

these companies as if that gap doesn't

even exist. Take OpenAI, the company

sitting in the eye of the storm. OpenAI

is still private, but the financials

leaked, and in June they filed

confidentially to go public, so the

picture's clear. Last year, OpenAI

brought in around $13 billion in

revenue, and before you say, "Pretty

good." Well, the company nearly tripled

that in losses. In 2025, OpenAI had a

net loss attributable to the company of

38 and a half billion dollars. By

OpenAI's own internal estimates, they

expect to burn well over $100 billion

between now and 2029. And here's the

cherry on top. On top of all of these

horrible fundamentals, the valuation is

worse. OpenAI's last funding round

valued the company at $852 billion,

more than 65 times its revenue. Another

side note, how did ChatGPT know I was

talking about itself here? Anyways,

these aren't bets on whether these are

good companies. These are bets that ride

on blind optimism, which reminds me of

what goes down as maybe the funniest

quote in finance history. And if you

haven't heard of this story, you're in

for a treat. It even beats out the Jamie

Dimon cockroach story from a few videos

ago. One of the people who stood at the

very center of what's considered the

worst financial crisis in history

admitted a crisis was coming out loud on

the record right before everything

broke. In the summer of 2007, months

before the entire global financial

system nearly collapsed, Charles Prince,

the CEO of Citigroup at the time, was

asked about the bank's continued

exposure to risky lending and deal

financing, even as the credit markets

were starting to look increasingly

stretched. His answer became one of the

most infamous lines in the history of

finance. He said, "When the music stops,

in terms of liquidity, things will be

complicated, but as long as the music is

playing, you've got to get up and dance.

We're still dancing." So, he wasn't

saying the party would last. He actually

was saying the opposite. He knew it

wouldn't. He was saying as long as the

money was flowing, he was going to keep

dancing anyway, because the second the

music stopped, whoever was still on the

floor would be the one who lost. He

understood that underneath all the

dancing, it was really a giant game of

hot potato, and the only thing that

mattered was making sure you'd pass the

hot potato on to someone else before the

music cut out, which is exactly what

you're watching now. Except the potato

is stock in an AI company priced for

perfection. The players are the founders

and the insiders, passing it to the next

eager buyer. Every one of them knows

someone eventually gets left holding it,

but none of them know exactly when the

passing stops. So, the only rational

move is to hand it off now to the

biggest, most enthusiastic crowd of

buyers they can possibly find, the

United States stock market. So, let's go

back to the beginning. At the start of

this video, I asked you a question. If

these really are the most valuable

companies in the world, and the future

is as bright as everyone keeps

promising, then why are the people who

know them best in such a hurry to sell?

We've spent this whole video circling

that question and giving context. Now we

can finally answer it. It's because it's

the smart thing to do. The people who

run these companies aren't dumb. They

can see the gap. They see that prices

have sprinted miles ahead of the

fundamentals. They know that the market

has priced these companies for a future

where every one of these bets pay off

perfectly. But they're also in the

middle of an AI arms race, so they need

deep pockets and an appetite for a bet

with a slim chance of ever paying off

can only last for so long, which means

whoever sells first gets to sell into

the hungry crowd. It doesn't actually

matter if these companies are good or

not. The price already assumed it.

There's little room left for good news

and enormous room left for

disappointment. Eventually the

fundamentals will catch up. They always

do, but I can't tell you when. I don't

have a magic stopwatch that can predict

when this bubble pops. I don't know if

it's in a month, in a year, or 3 years

from now. I don't know if these

companies grind higher for a long time

before any of it matters. Nobody knows

that and anyone who stares into a

camera, hands you a date, and acts like

they do know is lying to you. The

reality is you don't need the date. You

just need to be able to read the room,

which is the reason I made this video

and my channel in general is to help you

read the room you're standing in so

you're not the last one to notice the

music. And if that's worth something to

you and the version of finance you

actually want, hit subscribe. Because

you don't need to know the exact moment

the music stops to know one thing. You

don't want to be the last one on the

dance floor when it does.

>> [music]